Read Online Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 by Son of a Witch - Free Book Online Page B

But the Yunamata kept themselves hidden, as was their way.
    Beyond, heading downslope toward the Vinkus River and eventually the Emerald City, the world seemed cold and sore. The year was moving on. The occasional foothill farmhouses were crude, almost derelict, roofing thatch thick with mildew, gardens thin on the ground. If bread was offered, it was offered sullenly. No locals would take them in and provide anything like a mattress. The corner of a barn and a blanket crusty with pigeon droppings were the best the travelers could hope for. Still, exhausted with plodding, they slept hard and dreamlessly.
    To Liir, it wasn’t a question of how many days or weeks it took to reach the Emerald City, but how many hours a day he had to trudge before he could sink back into a safe sleep again. Not sleep, something richer: blissful annihilation. So he could forget the sideways throb of his flattened heart kicking: You. You. You . He kept the thought of Elphaba there, unwillingly; it pressed painfully against membranes so interior he had never known their existence before. I hated you. You left me. So I hate you more than I used to .
    The Kells dwindled, the scrubby flatland spread its wastes in fields of shattered stone. Oakhair forests began first to fringe the horizon, and then to loom with oakhair breath and the sound of wind in their leaves…Little of this registered on Liir without his wanting to say, “Look, look—the world you hated so much that you left it behind. It’s so weird. I can see why.”
    He couldn’t say this. He could hardly think it, with Dorothy rabbiting on about Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and various forgettable farmhands. Elphaba , thought Liir. Elphaba , he felt. Elphaba . The world without you.
    How am I to manage?
     
    T HE KELLS HAD LOOKED CLEAN, conceived by a keen architectural eye, and thrown up with confidence. By contrast, the Emerald City, on first sight, seemed organic, a metastasis of competing life-forms. Liir had never seen a settlement larger than a hamlet before, so he was flummoxed at the way the City punched itself against the horizon. Flummoxed, and daunted.
    “Don’t be scared,” said Dorothy, catching his hand. “Think of it as a thousand farmsteads piled on top of one another.”
    “And that isn’t a scary notion?”
    “I am going to find myself here,” declared the Tin Woodman.
    “I’m going to lose myself,” said the Lion.
    “Just try to blend in,” said Dorothy. “Act natural.”
    “Now that would be acting,” said the Tin Woodman, and barked one calf percussively against the other to underscore his point.
    “Come on,” said the Scarecrow, “we’re in luck.” He indicated a motley crew of traveling players advertising a silly new show done mostly with puppets. They were amusing the guards, and in the commotion the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars and Liir managed to sidle undetected through the City’s west portal. They debouched into a broad square. Judging from the stink of skark manure, the space served as a holding pen for beasts of transport while cargos were being unloaded and bills of lading composed. Plain granite storehouses faced the yard, and bears—or possibly even Bears, talking beasts, though they weren’t talking now—were hauling sacks of grain and crates of produce. “Ho,” yelled the overseers. Some were Munchkins, a third the height of their laborers. Their landing whips loosed splatters as of red rain.
    “We’re meat here, meat,” groaned the Lion. “Not that it’s all about me, but I feel so exposed .”
    “The Lion’s right. Come, let’s duck down this alley,” said Liir.
    “I’d expected a bit more fuss,” said Dorothy. “I mean, like it or not, the Witch is dead, and you’d think the word would have gotten out.” She held her own nose with one hand and Toto’s nose with the other. “Kansas boasts henhouses sweeter than this.”
    They wandered through commercial districts, crossing wide boulevards lined with dying